Board of Directors

President

Terkel ChristiansenUniversity of Southern Denmark

Terkel Christiansen is professor of Health Economics at University of Southern Denmark, and he has for more than a decade been the leader of the Health Economics Research Unit at this university. His was among the first to teach Health Economics in Denmark in the 1970s, and he was co-founder of NHESG, the Nordic Health Economists’ Study Group. In his research he has been internationally oriented and taken part in several EU funded projects as well as other projects based on international collaboration. He has served on several advisory boards to the Ministry of Health or National Board of Health. In 2007 he was the local host of iHEA’s 6th World Congress in Copenhagen.

Past President

Anne MillsLondon School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Anne Mills is Deputy Director and Provost of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and Professor of Health Economics and Policy. She has researched and published widely in the fields of health economics and health systems in low and middle income countries and continues to be involved in research on health insurance developments in South Africa, Tanzania, India and Thailand. She has had continuing involvement in supporting capacity development in health economics in universities, research institutes and governments. She has been involved in numerous policy initiatives including WHO's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health and the 2009 High Level Taskforce on Innovative International Finance for Health Systems. She has a CBE for services to medicine, is a Foreign Associate of the US Institute of Medicine, and a Fellow of the UK Academy of Medical Sciences. In 2009 she received the Prince Mahidol Award in the field of medicine. In 2013, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and in 2015, she was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year’s Honours, for services to international health.

Board Director

W. David BradfordUniversity of Georgia

W. David Bradford, Ph.D. is the Busbee Chair in Public Policy in the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia. He was formerly the Director and founder of the Center for Health Economic and Policy Studies at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and has been a visiting faculty member at Yale Medical School and a tenured faculty member in the Department of Economics at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Bradford has numerous publications (both in peer-reviewed outlets and in book chapters) and professional presentations and is co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Health Economics Letters.

He is also on the editorial board for the journal Health Economics, serves on the editorial board of the newsletter of the American Society of Health Economists, and is on the oversight boards for both the American Health Economics Conference and the Southeastern Health Economics Study Group.

Board Director

Don KenkelCornell University

Don Kenkel is the Joan K. and Irwin M. Jacobs Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1987 and has been at Cornell since 1995. Since 2011, he is jointly appointed as a Professor, Department of Economics. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Broadly speaking, most of his research is on the economics of disease prevention and health promotion. He is the author of the chapter on "Prevention" in the Handbook of Health Economics (2000). He has conducted a series of studies on the economics of public health policies, including: alcohol taxes and other policies to prevent alcohol problems; cigarette taxes to prevent youth smoking; and advertising to promote smoking cessation. His current research is on the economics of tobacco regulation. Another area of research and teaching interest is in cost-benefit analysis of public policies, especially policies that affect health.

Board Director

Diane McIntyreUniversity of Cape Town

Diane McIntyre is Professor of Health Economics in the School of Public Health and Family Medicine at the University of Cape Town and was the founding director of its Health Economics Unit. She holds a South African Research Chair in ‘Health and Wealth’, and is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine (IOM). She has provided extensive, high-level policy inputs within South Africa and other African countries, particularly in relation to health care financing issues, including currently contributing to the development of the National Health Insurance policy in South Africa. Her current focus is on conceptual and empirical research around how to achieve universal coverage in low- and middle-income countries and how to promote health system equity. She has also been centrally involved in developing health economics capacity within the African region, including establishing the first health economics masters program in Africa. She serves on the Board of the African Health Economics and Policy Association (AfHEA) and has chaired AfHEA’s International Scientific Committee since its inception. She has been a member of iHEA’s International Scientific Committee for several conferences, and was one of four co-chairpersons of this Committee for the 2003 iHEA conference.

Board Director

Richard SmithLondon School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Richard Smith is Professor of Health System Economics, and Dean of the Faculty of Public Health and Policy, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Following undergraduate and postgraduate studies in economics at the University of York in 1991, Richard worked in Sydney, Cambridge, Bristol, Melbourne and Norwich, before joining the London School in May 2007. From 2008-2011 he served as Head of Department of Global Health & Development, and since 2011 has served as Dean of Faculty of Public Health & Policy. The Faculty boasts one of the largest group of health economists in the world; especially those working in low- and middle-income settings.

Richard has worked on a wide range of health economics topics, from willingness-to-pay to public goods and externalities, and topics from genomic technologies to antibiotic resistance. In the last decade he has focussed mostly upon the interaction and interface between a nation’s health system and other systems – both within the nation (e.g. agriculture, manufacturing and finance sectors) and between different countries (e.g. through movement of health professionals and patients). This interest has been manifest in two areas: (i) macro-economic modeling of health (care), concerning the impact of communicable and non-communicable diseases and related polices; and (ii) economic analysis of the impact of trade and trade agreements. Richard has received research funding in excess of £30m, and has published more than 200 papers, chapters, reports etc (including many in Health Economics, Journal of Health Economics, Social Science & Medicine, The Lancet, Science, British Medical Journal).

Richard was a Charter Member of iHEA and has presented at every meeting, several times organising sessions, and over the last year has been part of the ‘iHEA 2020’ committee working on strategies for the future development of iHEA. He has also been part of the organising committees for two UK HESG meetings (and will no doubt be on a third when HESG comes to the London School!). He has been committed to advancing the work of health economics in every institution he has worked, including the development of MSc courses, growing capacity through appointments, and support for junior staff and students.

ASHEcon Representative

Laurence BakerStanford University

Laurence Baker, Ph.D. is a health economist and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University. His research examines a variety of health care economics and policy questions. He is the author of numerous works on the effects of financial incentives and organizational structures on the delivery of health care and health care spending, including extensive work on technological change in medicine and work on managed care and its effects. He also studies health care regulatory policy, efforts to improve quality in health care, and policies that affect the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

Dr. Baker serves as Chief of Health Services Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and has been appointed Fellow of the Center for Health Policy at Stanford University and Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, MA. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the Stanford University Department of Economics, and directs the Stanford University School of Medicine’s Scholarly Concentrations Program.

Dr. Baker was the recipient of the ASHE Medal from the American Society of Health Economists in 2008 and the Alice S. Hersh Young Investigator Award by the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy in 2000. In 1997 and 1999 he received the National Institute for Health Care Management’s research prize for his work on managed care. He serves as Senior Associate Editor for the journal Health Services Research, on the editorial board of Medical Care Research and Review. Dr. Baker received his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University in 1994.

iHEA Executive Director

Thomas GetzenTemple University

Thomas E. Getzen, Ph.D., founder and Executive Director of iHEA, is Professor of Risk, Insurance and Health Management at Temple University, and has also been a visiting professor at the University of Toronto, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Policy at Princeton University, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Centre for Health Economics at the University of York, and serves as the editor-in-chief for "HEN-Health Economics Network" in collaboration with SSSRN, associate editor for Health Economics, and as a reviewer for a number of medical, health services, and economics journals. His textbookHealth Economics & Financing (Wiley; 4th ed., 2010) is used in graduate and undergraduate programs throughout the world and his research and consulting focus on the macroeconomics of health, forecasting medical expenditures, physician supply, price indexes, financing and, public health economics. Professor Getzen periodically updates the forecasting model of "Long Run Medical Cost Trends" for the Society of Actuaries, and current serves on the Institute of Medicine Committee on Public Health Strategies.

President-Elect

Adam WagstaffWorld Bank

Adam Wagstaff is Research Manager of the Human Development & Public Services team in the World Bank’s Development Research Group.

He has a PhD in Economics from the University of York and before joining the World Bank in 1998 was a Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex. He was Associate Editor of the Journal of Health Economics for 20 years, and has published extensively on a variety of aspects of the field, including: health financing and health systems reform; equity and equality; the valuation of health; the demand for and production of health; efficiency measurement, and illicit drugs and drug enforcement.

Much of Adam’s recent work has been on health insurance, health financing, vulnerability and health shocks, and provider payment reform. Adam has worked on countries at all levels of economic development and in all regions of the world. Outside health economics, he has published on the measurement of scientific influence, development effectiveness, the redistributive effects of economic growth and taxes, public sector efficiency measurement, and the measurement of trade union power. Adam has a blog and is on Twitter at @adamw2011.

Treasurer

James F. Burgess, Jr.Boston University

Jim Burgess is an Associate Professor of Health Services in the Boston University School of Public Health with over 15 years of extensive health care management, health economics research, and educational experience putting health services research into practice in diverse settings. He also serves the health economics field as a founding co-editor of the electronic Health Economics Letters, the first fully electronic peer reviewed journal in health economics, and as a founding co-editor of iHEA News. For the past four years he also has been a member of the Audit Committee for the Association.

He has a primary appointment in the Management Science Group of the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) where he currently is an organizing member of the Secretary's Advisory Group on VA Physician Productivity and Staffing and the VA Learning Xchange, a leadership group promoting organization learning and change.

His wide-ranging intellectual and research pursuits include special interests in considering effects of local context in efficiency analysis, audience differences in provider quality profiling, and patient heterogeneity in risk adjustment.

Some of his important first authored publications include "Federal Provision of Health Care: Creating Access for the Underinsured," published in 1991 in the Journal of Health Care for the Poor and Underserved; a series of articles on technical inefficiency in health care with Wilson, including one in 1996 in Management Science; and two articles published in 2000 on health care profiling using hierarchical models, including one in Journal of Health Economics entitled "Medical Profiling: Improving Standards and Risk Adjustments using Hierarchical Models". Other published research with numerous co-authors include studies of hospital competition and relationships to HMO business, hospital quality and cost functions, risk adjustment and profiling in diabetes care, design of global budgeting systems, productivity and staffing models in hospitals, industrial organization of health care providers, and the impact of distance and other factors on the use of outpatient health services. At Boston University, he currently co-directs the masters and doctoral programs in Health Services Research.

Board Director

Denzil FiebigUniversity of New South Wales

Denzil Fiebig (BCom (Hons) MCom (Hons), PhD University of Southern California), took up his current position of Professor in the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales in 2001. Previously he held a chair in econometrics at the University of Sydney and prior to that held teaching positions at the Universities of Wollongong and Southern California. Denzil was President of the Australian Health Economics Society 2005-10, he has Chaired the Scientific Committee of the Australasian Workshop on Econometrics and Health Economics since its inception in 2009, has been on the Scientific Committee for the International Health Economics Association since 2006 and was co-chair of the iHEA 2013 World Congress held in Sydney. He serves on the Advisory Boards of the Centre for Health Economics Research and Evaluation (CHERE), University of Technolgy Sydney, the Centre for Health Economics (CHE), Monash University and the National Centre for Econometric Research, Queensland University of Technology and is on the editorial board for the Economic Record. In 2003 Denzil was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. His research interests are in micro-econometrics and for the last decade his applied work has concentrated on health economics with an emphasis on modelling utilization of health care and services using both revealed and stated preference data. His publications in econometrics and health economics have appeared in journals such as Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Marketing Science, Journal Health Economics, Health Economics and Social Science and Medicine.

Board Director

Maarten LindeboomVU University Amsterdam

Maarten Lindeboom is Professor of Economics at VU University Amsterdam. He studied econometrics at VU University of Amsterdam and graduated in 1986. He received his Ph.D. at Leiden University in 1992 and held positions at Leiden University and Tilburg University; and visiting positions at Bristol University and the University of Michigan. He is also associate editor of Health Economics. His research interests are Health and Labor economics, in particular issues related to Health and Work, The measurement of health and The Determinants of Later Life Health and Mortality. He has published among others in American Economic Review, the Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Social Science and Medicine, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Demography, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (series A & B) and Journal of Human Resources.

Board Director

Albert OkunadeUniversity of Memphis

Albert Okunade, Ph.D., is Economics Professor and faculty affiliate of the Center for Community Health and Senior Research Fellow at the Methodist-LeBonheur Center for Healthcare Economics at University of Memphis (USA). He coordinates the Ph.D. Economics program, teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in healthcare and pharmaceutical economics, and chairs doctoral dissertations in health economics. His more than 100 publications include dozens of single- and co-authored healthcare articles (various topic areas) in Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Southern Economic Journal, Journal of Productivity Analysis, Health Policy, Managed Care Quarterly, Applied Economics, Health Care Management Science, Journal of Health Care Finance, etc. His research honors include Suzanne Downs-Palmer Professorships, First Tennessee Professorship, Superior Performance in University Research, and University Distinguished Research awards. The Review of Black Political Economy ranked him the 3rd leading US Black economist (based on peer-review publications indexed in The Journal of Economic Literature). Broadly ranged citations to his published research run in several hundreds. His has presented papers at conferences in Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Portugal, Senegal, Spain, UK, USA, etc.

Professor Okunade has Guest Edited Special Issues of peer review journals, including The Quarterly Review of Economics & Finance, Journal of Pharmaceutical Finance, Economics & Policy, and Journal of Health Care Finance. He was appointed to serve on the inaugural Board of Trustees of The American Society of Health Economists (ASHEcon). He has reviewed grant applications for National Science Foundation (USA) and serves as ad hoc referee for health (care) manuscripts submitted for peer-reviews in journals including Journal of Health Economics, Health Economics, Southern Economic Journal, Contemporary Economic Policy, BioMed Central journals, Clinical Breast Cancer, European Journal of Health Economics, Health Policy, Politics and Law, The Lancet, etc.

Since the 1996 Vancouver iHEA Congress, he has proposed and chaired competitive and invited sessions, discussed papers, and served on iHEA’s annual Scientific and Strategic Planning Committees. Professor Okunade earned Ph.D. Economics degree (1986) at The University of Arkansas (USA) and served a faculty sabbatical at the Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA (USA).

AHES Representative

Bruce HollingsworthMonash University

Professor Bruce Hollingsworth is Director of the Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. He is recipient of a Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) Public Health Fellowship. His previous appointment was at the University of Newcastle, UK. He has a PhD (Newcastle, UK), MSc Health Economics (York, UK), and BA (Hons) Economics.

Research and international collaborative publications are principally in the area of efficiency measurement with respect to the production of health and health care, social determinants of health, and the translation of research into practice.

Among current large grants, he is Chief Investigator on: an NHMRC Programme Grant on chronic disease prevention; a DoHA grant on Depression; an NHMRC grant on the costs and benefits of complimentary and alternative medicine; Chief Investigator A on two ARC Discovery Grants, to look at health production, and to look at the economics of obesity; as well as Associate Investigator A on an NHMRC Health Services Research Programme Grant focusing on modelling health care systems.

Bruce supervises seven PhD students, co-organises the Australasian Workshops on Econometrics and Health Economics, and is an Associate Editor of Health Economics.

He runs the health economics email discussion list, is on the iHEA International Standing Scientific Committee, is an active member of health economics organisations worldwide, is an invited speaker at many international conferences and to Government bodies, is referee for 38 international journals, a referee of international standing for the ARC, the NHMRC and several international grant bodies, and has over 150 publications.

AES LAC Representative

Arturo holds a degree in Economy from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and has a Master of Arts in Economy from Boston University (1984) where he was a Fulbright Fellow. He has also completed a postgraduate course as University Professor at Universidad Isalud.

He directs a Master Course in Health and Management Economics in the Health sector at Universidad Isalud (since 2000). He also is a Professor in Health Economics, Managerial Auditing and Proyect Evaluation at Universidad Isalud and at Universidad de Buenos Aires. He has also taught at Universidad T. Tella, Universidad de la República, Uruguay and Universita di Roma, Tor Vergata.

Arturo has worked in economic evaluation of health and social public programs & policies, as well as for the Ministry of Health (Argentina), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and the international Development Research Centre-(IDRC) (Uruguay), among others.

He also has experience as management auditor of public and non for profit organizations in the Auditoria General de La Nación (similar to GAO in the US). Nowadays, Arturo holds a position as a chief department in the National Management Auditing Authority (“Auditoria General de la Nación”) auditing social projects with international funding (IADB and WB).

He has also been a foundational member of the “Latin American and the Caribbean Health Economic Association” AES-LAC, created in October of the 2008 and is a past president of the Argentinean Health Economic Association (A.E.S-ARG) (2005-2007).

Current Board

Terkel Christiansen, President

Adam Wagstaff, President-Elect

Anne Mills, Past-President

James F. Burgess, Jr., Treasurer

W. David Bradford

Denzil Fiebig

Maarten Lindeboom

Don Kenkel

Diane McIntyre

Albert Okunade

Richard Smith

Laurence Baker, ASHEcon

Bruce Hollingsworth, AHES

Arturo L.F. Schweiger, AES LAC

Thomas Getzen, ex officio, iHEA

iHEA

The International Health Economics Association was formed to increase communication among health economists, foster a higher standard of debate in the application of economics to health and health care systems, and assist young researchers at the start of their careers.